Almost 30 years ago, Scream brought back the near-dead slasher genre by infusing it with a hip, teen vibe to it. Shortly thereafter, the original I Know What You Did Last Summer entered the teen slasher chat. Well, recently Scream has been enjoying a nice little renaissance with a couple of new movies, so it only figures that there’d be a new I Know What You Did Last Summer, too, right? Yes, unfortunately, that is right.
I Know What You Did Last Summer is about five friends who, on the Fourth of July, inadvertently cause an accident in which an innocent person is killed. In order to preserve their futures (see: save their skins), the group makes a pact amongst themselves to never speak of their involvement again. But, the next year, one of them gets a suspicious note saying only (yep, you guessed it) “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” And then, one by one, the friends get killed in brutal and violent ways.
From there, it just becomes your run-of-the-mill slasher movie.
If that sounds familiar, that’s because it is. This I Know What You Did Last Summer is pretty much the same exact story as the original I Know What You Did Last Summer. Except, in this one’s universe, the original series of murders did take place, so these murders seem like a copycat version. And this gives the later group of victims a chance to enlist the help of the last spree’s survivors, Julie James and Ray Bronson (Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze, Jr. reprising their roles from the nineties).
The problem here is that where Scream is smart and witty enough to lean into the self-referential side of the narrative in order to force things to make sense, I Know What You Did Last Summer just seems kind of silly, like the whole town buried the past so, in turn, they’re doomed to repeat it. And that sins-of-the-father concept doesn’t quite land.
It seems that director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (Do Revenge) is trying to tap into the nostalgic nineties aspect of the franchise, but in doing so, I Know What You Did Last Summer just becomes a parody of itself. It doesn’t help that the script, written by Robinson along with Leah McKendrick (M.F.A.) and Sam Lansky (his first produced screenplay), is pretty much a carbon copy of the original film, only with more archetypical characters and hefty doses of brainless dialogue (one character actually says “what the f*ck, Bro?” to the killer right before he’s done in). The few surprises that are in the movie all depend, again, on the nostalgia felt towards the original film. It doesn’t really stand on its own. It all feels more like a comic parody than an actual horror movie.
Now, when I Know What You Did Last Summer is just being a plain old slasher movie, it’s not bad. Slasher movies are generally derivative by nature anyway, and the kills in this one are fairly effective. They’re not really scary, but they’re suspenseful and tense enough, and definitely bloody as all heck. So, as a slasher, I Know What You Did Last Summer doesn’t completely fail. Unfortunately, to get to the gory kill scenes, the viewer has to sit through the corny stuff.
The big question with I Know What You Did Last Summer is whether or not it’s supposed to be a comedy. It doesn’t seem like it is. Most of the humor feels unintentional, but it’s still humorous. And the viewer is not laughing with it, they’re laughing at it. Which isn’t always a bad thing for a horror movie, but in this case, it is. It’s too ridiculous to be scary, but it takes itself too seriously to be an all-out comedy. So, there it sits, somewhere in the middle, just waiting for someone to put it out of its misery.
GRADE: D+
Rating: R for language throughout, brief drug use, bloody horror violence, and some sexual content
Release Date: July 18, 2025
Running Time: 1 hour 51 minutes
Studio: Columbia Pictures
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